In 1831, young adventurer and nature enthusiast Charles Darwin set sail on a remarkable five-year voyage that changed the study of biology forever. In this fascinating new book, award-winning author Ruth Ashby shares the story of Darwin s famous journey aboard the British navy ship, the Beagle , which led to the development of his theories of evolution and natural selection. Ashby s lively account follows the naturalist s exciting trip around the world through seasickness, a life-threatening illness, and even an earthquake as he explores South America, the Cape Verde Islands, Tahiti, and the Galapagos Islands. During his travels, Darwin meets indigenous peoples and carefully collects and catalogs plants, fossils, birds, mammals, and insects. Darwin s observations of the distribution and diversity of plant and animal life ultimately leads to the development of his theories on evolution and the publication of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES in 1859. Readers will be inspired by Darwin s transformation from talented but mediocre schoolboy into a remarkable scientist as they read about the revolutionary voyage that forever changed the world of biology.
This book has been graded for interest at 7-10 years.
There are 116 pages in this book. This book was published 2009 by Peachtree Publishing Company .
This book contains the following stories:
On the Origin of Species
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Darwin proposed that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. Individual members of populations vary, but it is the characteristics of the most successful in any population that are disproportionately passed onto the next generation. Darwin provided evidence that diversity of life resulted from this inheritance of certain characteristics by the fittest through a branching pattern of evolution. He provided evidence for his theory, much of which was collected on his Beagle expedition. The Origin of the Species was published on 24 November 1859.
The Voyage of the Beagle
On 27 December 1831, HMS Beagle sailed out of Devonport on a voyage that would take it from Plymouth to Madeira and the Canary islands, to the Cape Verde islands, Brazil, the Falklands, the Galapagos, New Zealand, Australia and Tasmania. On this trip was a young Charles Darwin, and the discoveries he made there set him on a path to his momentous work on evolution, as detailed in The Origin of the Species.
